Journal of Laboratory Automation

The LabMatrix™ is a prototyping system designed to give the user a practical and versatile platform for testing microfluidic applications in the fields of health care and life sciences. The LabMatrix™ system consists of a microfluidic breadboard and cover that align and secure a series of specially designed LabMatrix™ microfluidic chips. Chips are easily arranged and rearranged into a user-defined fluidic network. The LabMatrix™ system is designed with maximum flexibility in mind, providing the user with a means to prototype a wide range of microfluidic applications in a short period.

Infectious diseases pose threats from natural and manmade sources, and arguably the situation is getting worse. The outbreak of the coronavirus causing the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) shows that the world is linked by thousands of people traveling millions of miles every single day who can spread SARS or new strains of influenza with pandemic potential. ¹ The world is also becoming a more dangerous place, with rogue nations and terrorist networks aggressively seeking nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Of these, biological weapons are the cheapest to produce and likely the most attractive because they can be used anonymously.

Demands for higher quantity and quality of sequence data during genome sequencing projects have led to a need for completely automated reagent systems designed to isolate, process, and analyze DNA samples. While much attention has been given to methodologies aimed at increasing the throughput of sample preparation and reaction setup, purification of the products of sequencing reactions has received less scrutiny despite the profound influence that purification has on sequence quality. Commonly used and commercially available sequencing reaction cleanup methods are not optimal for purifying sequencing reactions generated from larger templates, including bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) and those generated by rolling circle amplification. Theoretically, these methods would not remove the original template since they only exclude small molecules and retain large molecules in the sample. If the large template remains in the purified sample, it could understandably interfere with electrokinetic injection and capillary performance. We demonstrate that the use of MagneSil® paramagnetic particles (PMPs) to purify ABI PRISM® BigDye® sequencing reactions increases the quality and read length of sequences from large templates. The high-quality sequence data obtained by our procedure is independent of the size of template DNA used and can be completely automated on a variety of automated platforms.

Parallel printing in a microarray format is becoming increasingly important. This paper presents a 2-D multi-channel dispenser with a spotting spacing of 500 μm. The dispenser is continuously loaded from a 384-well plate format and shoots upward. New technologies using polyimide substrate was developed, and the flexibility of the polyimide sheets allows scaling the dispenser up to an array format of 24 × 16. Drop formation is analyzed by stroboscopic illumination and by spotting onto glass slides. Droplets of 65 pL are dispensed in parallel up to 5 kHz at a droplet speed of 2 m/s.

Acoustic droplet ejection (ADE) gently and precisely aliquots nanoliter and picoliter liquid volumes without any physical contact with the solution being transferred. The technology is very automation-friendly, as it is compatible with conventional microplates. Focused energy from an acoustic transducer induces droplet ejection into an inverted standard microplate. The commercial system transfers low-nanoliter volumes of dimethyl sulfoxide–dissolved compound libraries and thereby enables cell-based assays to be performed in 1536-well plates.

A system using a liquid-core waveguide for the full scanning of capillary electrophoresis processes is presented. The system utilizes the liquid-core waveguide as an efficient window for the excitation of separated samples and the collection of light through total internal reflectance, with zeptomolar detection limits. Scanning the excitation laser along the length of the electrophoresis capillary excites individually separated analyte bands, while the fluorescence is collected end-on by an optical fiber coupled to a photomultiplier. A new procedure for denoising and deconvolution was applied to the experimental electropherograms, removing the noise and resolving the highly overlapped peaks observed in early stages of the separation.

The authors automated an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay to detect porcine serum antibodies to Toxoplasma gondii. Two thousand swine sera can be assayed in two eight-hour shifts using a robotic workstation. The automated-ELISA programming is not complex and the test configuration is flexible. This high-throughput screening (HTS) a-ELISA can achieve a 10-fold increase (100→ 1000 tests) in test capacity over the manual method. The assay has been validated according to the requirements of the ISO/IEC 17025 standard. These include repeatability, reproducibility, and optimal threshold value studies. Other requirements are proficiency panel testing, analyst training, standard operation procedure, and equipment certifications.